I was thinking about moderation in PieFed after reading @rimu@piefed.social mention he doesn’t want NSFW content because it creates more work to moderate. But if done right, moderation shouldn’t fall heavily on admins at all.
One of the biggest flaws of Reddit is the imbalance between users and moderators—it leads to endless reliance on automods, AI filters, and the usual complaints about power-mods. Most federated platforms just copy that model instead of proven alternatives like Discourse’s trust level system.
On Discourse, moderation power gets distributed across active, trusted users. You don’t see the same tension between "users vs. mods," and it scales much better without requiring admins to constantly police content. That sort of system feels like a much healthier direction for PieFed.
Implementing this system could involve establishing trust levels based on user engagement within each community. Users could earn these trust levels by spending time reading discussions. This could either be community-specific—allowing users to build trust in different communities—or instance-wide, giving a broader trust recognition based on overall activity across the instance. However, if not executed carefully, this could lead to issues such as overmoderation similar to Stack Overflow, where genuine contributions may be stifled, or it might encourage karma farming akin to Reddit, where users attempt to game the system using bots to repost popular content repeatedly.
Worth checking out this related discussion:
Rethinking Moderation: A Call for Trust Level Systems in the Fediverse.
And when used correctly, them being a great boon - e.g. users can set up automated keyword filters (allowing None, All, or even just Some of the content through), which is a decision made by oneself not someone else.
Community mods likewise choose whatever they are comfortable with - e.g. if you dislike people who downvote literally every post in the community, then it helps to have tools to detect and put a stop to that. The main thing there is (it seems to me) to remain on top of understanding and making appropriate use of the tool so that it isn't doing something that you do not approve of - e.g. in the aforementioned example perhaps downvoting two posts in the community should not trigger a ban (however short in duration) whereas downvoting twenty should (so then what about 10? 5?).